How to be a one person recruitment team – Part One – Collaboration

I joined Toca Boca back in December and I couldn’t be happier! It truly is a very creative place to work where you get to acknowledge your inner child. Just the fact that I if I ever wanted to ride around the office on a pedal go-kart, I can, makes me smile 🙂 But that’s not the point of this blog post. I wanted to share with you what I have spent my first month doing in terms of setting processes and automation. Being the sole recruiter means I have to adhere to the advice I gave during my talk at TechRec in Berlin back in November.

The talk was titled “How to be a one person recruitment team” and focused on what I believe to be the three most important aspects of succeeding as a one person recruitment team; Collaboration, Automation and Optimization. I will write a separate blog post about each of these aspects, starting with Collaboration.

Collaboration

I wasn’t lucky enough to start with a completely blank slate, there was some ongoing recruitment processes with phone screens and interviews already booked (some already having taken place). In order to get up to speed quickly, I sat in on the interviews and phone screens. Rather than having an intake meeting with the hiring managers, I managed to quickly get the information I needed about the roles from the questions the candidates asked during their interviews. This save both me and the hiring managers a bit of time, and I also got a good insight as to how the interviews are structured.

Involving the hiring managers & their teams

We are going to be recruiting a lot of people in the next few months at Toca Boca. One of the great things about Toca Boca is that we have a strong brand, resulting in quite few applications. Even though this is great, it does result in a lot of CV and portfolio screening, which takes time. With me being the only recruiter it will be close to impossible without the help of the hiring managers & their teams.

If I was to do all that screening myself, it would take up way too much of my time. Instead, I have asked the hiring managers, or key person from the team, to help out with the screening. For the creative roles, where there is a portfolio or showreel to look at, I will do a rough cut and leave the rest up to those who know more about design etc. than I do. But in order to keep the candidates in the loop, and create an as good candidate experience as possible, we have made use of a great feature in our ATS (JazzHR).

The workflows in JazzHR are fully customizable, so for the creative roles I have added the stage “Portfolio Review”. When I do the first screening, and come across a portfolio I want the team to take a closer look at, I will move them to that stage, signaling to the team they need to look at it. Another great thing is that I can assign a task to each stage, in this case, an e-mail. So when candidates are moved to “Portfolio Review” they will get an email letting them know they have made it to the next stage of our recruitment processes and that their portfolio is being looked at by the hiring team. So the candidates are kept in the loop without me really having to do anything. Time saved for all.

In my next blog post, about automation, I will tell you have I’ve made even better use of this feature with the help of Calendly.

Employer Branding

As I mentioned above, Toca Boca  has quite a strong brand already. When I started our LinkedIn company page had 6000+ followers, and that was without us ever posting a single thing. And the numbers kept going, and is still going, up by around 50 followers a week.

One of the things I want to do is start communicating more as the employer Toca Boca, not just the brand our users are used to. Rather than taking on the task by myself I’ve had some meetings with our Social Media Manager to bounce ideas and understand how we communicate in social media. Even though our target audiences are slightly different on, let’s say instagram, compared to Linkedin, Alexandra (our SoMe manager) sits on a lot of great knowledge.

After a few meetings we have finally arrived at some sort of a plan for our Linkedin page. It won’t just be Alexandra and me. I will of course do my best in invloving the whole company to better showcase ourselves and what we do. You’ll just have to keep an eye out on our company page to find out more 🙂

Do next

I’m no way near done, I’ve only just started. I need to keep building relationships with all the teams and hiring managers, find out more about them, what they do and their hiring needs. I need to find a way of communicating my way of thinking when it comes to recruitment and make sure people understand why I do things a certain way.

My next post will focus on automation, more specifically Zapier and Calendly and how I have used these tools to help me free up more time for the important stuff.